Bring on the hordes.
Published by violet April 18th, 2008 in Culture, Let's Go Meta!, MediaAnd I’m back! With, as promised, content and shit. For my first post, I will channel my not-very-inner-bourgeoisie and write about National Public Radio.
No. Seriously.
A couple of days ago, Talk of the Nation had Roger Mudd and Bob Schaffer, both former reporters at the CBS news bureau, reminiscing about their days working at that company. The discussion turned pretty quickly to how the the world is changing, how television newscasts are aimed more and more transparently at entertainment over information, and how Americans are more concerned with American Idol than with Real Issues.
And this matters, right? I’m about to dismiss it pretty completely, but let’s just appreciate for a moment that the corporate monoculture sold by the big networks, studios, and labels is still massively influential as to what and how people in the west think. Simon Cowell can say a sentence—basically any sentence—and more Americans will immediately believe him than know who Hosni Mubarak is. That’s relevant. And more subtly, too: Randall Munroe focused on top-20 Hollywood movies in his recent look at the portrayal of women heroes (summary: whowhat kind of heroes now? how silly), and his reason for doing so was that in a very real way, these images are our culture. There are many reasons to critique it, and many, many critiques to be had.
But still, when Bob Schaffer gets up on Talk of the Nation and says, “Thirty years ago, the combined audience of the three network newscasts was fifty-two million. Today, it is twenty-seven million. Today, American Idol has an audience of twenty-seven million,” truly, I struggle to care.
Here’s Schaffer on the lingering death of newspapers:
The problem for newspapers these days is not so much the journalism. It’s finding the sources of revenue to be able to pay for these very expensive enterprises. We talk about bloggers going to take the place of newspapers, and all of that… Bill Keller, who’s the editor of the New York Times, tells me that they spend two and a half million dollars a year just on the security that they have to have to keep their bureau in Baghdad open.
The meaning, obviously, is that bloggers could never mount an enterprise of that magnitude. Implied: if the great makers of our culture do not do this thing, then obviously it will not be done, and we will live in a dark age where we know of nothing beyond the tips of our noses.
Obviously, this is true. There’s no way someone could blog from Iraq! After all, it’s not like anyone lives there.
The response to that is that we just don’t know if we can trust these random people on the Internet. They are, after all, posting their personal experiences and critiques, with their own sets of biases and assumptions, and wow, that could mean that our biases and assumptions won’t be reflected! When Walter Cronkite tells you something, you know that it’s safe for good Americans to believe it. But everyone else, why, they could say just anything.
That is the great problem for journalists, now. How do we deal with this constant bombardment of information, that not only are our viewers and listeners and readers getting, but that we are getting as well? —Roger Mudd
A friend of mine recently observed that whenever people talk about the Internet in other media, the results are… never quite right. It doesn’t matter how conversant the writer or speaker actually is in technology and net culture, there’s always this undertone of trying to explain to your grandparents just what the Google is really all about. There’s an element of that here—an ignorance of soft security and soft verifiability, an ignorance of the kinds of navigational skills that drawing from this big ocean of primary sources both requires and stimulates.
But more, there’s a fundamental sense of fear. Having grown up in an environment where you built your identity on the trusted words of a few white men, it must be terrifying to look at the enormous, overflowing wealth of voices that can now be heard and realize that people are listening. Not that many, not yet, but they are listening to them and not you. It is in a very real way the downfall of western civilization. It’s not a violent revolution so much as simply the collapse of that particular institution that distills the world into a pleasant hour to be taken in at the end of the day. It’s the slow degradation of our ability to say the world is like this and have it simply be true.
And I, for one, welcome the barbarian hordes.
Why yes, away with the old media entirely - it’s not like anyone writing a blog lies or can easily be taken in by, say, a student claiming she had multiple miscarraiges in a matter of months.
This sort of knee-jerk anti-”old” media reads like something from 2002, it’s not the level of thoughtful insight I expect from punkass. It’s rather simple, shallow point.
I have problems with simplistic, bombastic dismissals of blogs by the mainstream press, but I’m equally annoyed with this blather about the death of old media.
Blogs work as checks and connections which old media now fails to do (often using the excuse bloggers do it for them) and some enterprises like TalkingPointsMemo are moving slowly towards standalone journalism - interestingly this model ends up resemble “old” media in some ways.
But most blogs, dispite my love for them, are little more than independent pundits, making original observations but wholly dependent on material from other sources - almost entirely old media material. The reason for this is the old media product, despite new media contempt, is still produces the well funded and better vetted material than, say, Pajamas Media. Due to the libel law loopholes covering the internet - the ones which allow Matt Drudge to exist - vetting is an issue.
I’d like to see some unfunded blog like Punkass deliver fully researched, edited and verified in-depth local stories using only original sources on daily basis, but it has yet to happen. Meanwhile, current experiments in citizen journalism are struggling to find ways to screen out PR flacks. Plus there’s the issue of how the medium of new media is wholly owned by massive corporations with even less interest in the public good, if that’s possible. If newspapers die off, then the spigot of news will fully be in the hands of people who want to eliminate net neutrality - and are finding ways to do so even with regulation.
I’m just saying. Nice thoughtful-ish rant, tho’.
LR,
i think we agree on some points but not the conclusions. investigative journalism is one of the areas blogs have yet to excel in, primarily because — as you say — it takes a bunch of time and money to do it right.
the problem is, most newspapers are doing a crap job of it, too. they’ve cut waaaay down on investigative journalism while pumping up the op-eds and pulitzer puff pieces as they struggle to stay viable. only the alt-weeklies seem to be trying to dig deeper and tell stories that aren’t sitting right on the surface.
if the mainstream media was doing its job, we would’ve had more than john stewart and the blogs and the alts shrieking about the obviously fallacious reasons for going to war with iraq. to this day, the AP and most major networks/papers spend their time on 2 things: regurgitating words from primary sources like the white house press secretary with no thoughtful critique or analysis or insight of any kind, or going the other direction and having some partisan hack spew ignorant gibberish to sound outrageous.
other than a few peeps like sy hersh, the mainstream media severely lacks voices of expertise and reason that will tell the f***ing truth. but they’re all over the blogs - juan cole, lindsay beyerstein, pam spaulding, bitch phd, and those are just some of the big names.
what i think we’re finding is that the blogs will eventually be among the sources digging deeper. as violet points out, we’ll have access to less-filtered primary sources like people *living* in iraq. we’ll also have field experts like cole who get paid to know this stuff and blog about it because it’s their passion. and shoot, when we had mcboing here, i learned a lot more about how ugly cable corps worked than i ever got from any old media outlet.
so, yeah. go hordes. and 2002, apparently.
Roger Mudd and Bob Schaffer, are correct to some extent. The problem is they are comparing (their idea of) the current state of news on the Internet (blogs being just one component) to the idealized concept of newspapers and TV journalism from the past.
There are very few really serious journalists and media outlets anymore. And their audiences are small and diminishing.
Instead of the “talking head” shallowness of breezy tabloid TV “news” being recognized and eliminated, the cancer has spread into newspapers, many blogs, etc.
Mudd and Scaffer remember Woodward-and-Bernstein-style journalism. The fact that Cheney/Bush have escaped virtually unscathed despite being responsible for crimes much more massive than Nixon ever attempted, is a ringing condemnation of the current state of serious journalism today.
It’s inevitable that the Internet will provide the serious content needed (and it already has to some extent). It’s much easier to have a successful niche “product” on the Internet than in physical print or TV. A small but loyal audience is available for just about anything, without the huge startup and operating costs of a newspaper or TV channel.
The paradigm is shifting, and I don’t think we will ever see things like they were in “the good old days” ever again. Which is not unusual at all, and in fact, is just another part of “the great circle of life”…
My point isn’t that New Media Are Going To Trample Old Media just… ‘cuz. In fact, my point isn’t that New Media Will Trample Old Media. I’m not making a point about the media (as distinct from the content), I’m actually making a point about content and the distribution of authority. Walter Cronkite cannot exist in today’s world, and however nice Walter Crokite might be, I think that’s a good thing. My point is that if most of these big news media organizations are, in fact, withering as Schaffer and Mudd (and to be fair, most of the western world) seems to think, then it isn’t some deep tragedy. That it in fact carries this positive element of eroding certain power structures that have a deep investment in keeping the world chugging happily along, unchallenged.
It costs the New York Times a bunch of money to keep an office in Baghdad because they’re coming in as part of this big imperialist machine, and whatever else imperialism may be, it is not cheap. That’s the kind of enterprise that is truly threatened, and I am not crying for it very much.
I should’ve mentioned that I think professional journalism will survive in some form or another for a long, long time. Hell, I think the Times and other such institutions will survive, but they’ll have to change how they look at the world and news-gathering. Long after kids are asking, “grandmum, what’s a newspaper?” There will still be people like Paul Salopek who take their western perspective and go to places where it is deeply foreign, and there will always be National Geographics willing to pay him to do so. I think there’s value in that. But the fact that those outsider voices will be balanced by the voices of people whose lives are the news is overdue.
Shorter me:
Schaffer: Oh my god. The Times is dying! CBS is closing its news division! Clearly, we must freak out.
Violet: I will not freak out! For I think these are good things, because maybe over time people will start listening to people who aren’t on CBS or in the Times.
(Except, in fairness, Schaffer smart and not panicking, but he does seem to think we’re going to have to start relying on the town crier.)
The problem with the main stream media is that they have to pander to such a large audience, they can’t risk making a large group of people mad. So, instead of aggressively pointing out the flaws, lies, and mistakes in the Cheney/Bush presidency, they just repeat straight facts, while downplaying negatives. They don’t want a large chunk of their audience flocking to Fox News or the Christian Broadcasting Network, because they make papa Bush and the upstanding Christian Republicans look bad. A great example of this is the lie Mukasey told about FISA at a conference, inferring that 9/11 could have been prevented if the government had telecom immunity and warrantless wiretapping. When questioned by Congress, it came out that the “call” from Afghanistan to the U.S., the call that had the government wiretapped could have saved 3000 New Yorkers, was made up by Mukasey. And if there had been a call, under the old FISA laws the government could have listened to it, and just gotten a warrant later. Glenn Greenwald covered this in amazing detail, and then he compared the number of stories this got as opposed to Obama’s bowling. I don’t remember the exact numbers but there were only like 300 stories on this and thousands on Obama’s poor bowling skills. If theres someway to make a democrat look bad, or better yet a juicy sex scandal, the media is all over it (ie Spitzer).
For my money, the best analysis I’ve ever seen comes from blogs, and like Marc said the alt-weeklies are the best sources of investigative journalism.